Here
is one of my infrequent and irregular reports about how things appear from
my viewpoint. The main thing is to read Hansen's paper which contains some
revelations and the Nature paper which bolsters Svenmark's correlations
and gives further doubt to the predictions of the radiative transfer merchants.

Summary of a paper by James Hansen
et al., of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies published in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Science, USA [Volume
95, 12753, 1998] entitled "Climate forcings in
the Industrial era."

The abstract is very revealing and I reproduce
it in full.

ABSTRACT

The forcings that
drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient
to define future climate change. Anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs),
which are well measured, cause a strong positive (warming) forcing. But
other, poorly measured, anthropogenic forcings, especially changes of atmospheric
aerosols, clouds, and land-use patterns, cause a negative forcing that
tends to offset greenhouse warming. One consequence of this partial balance
is that natural forcing due to solar irradiance changes may play a larger
role in long-term climate change than inferred from comparison with GHG's
alone. Current trends in GHG climate forcings are smaller than in popular
business as usual' or 1% per year carbon dioxide growth scenarios. The
summary implication is a paradigm change (whatever one of those is) for
long-term climate projections: uncertainties in climate forcings have supplanted
global climate sensitivity as the predominant issue.

Not before time say I!

If only the IPCC would concur with these
conclusions they would lose most of their objectors, particularly if they
concluded that no precipitate actions should be carried out to upset the
World's economy. There is still argument about the magnitude of the climate
sensitivity and the impossibility of doubling the carbon dioxide level.

I highlight various statements and add
my own comments as necessary.

1. Climate forcings
due to GHGs can be computed accurately because the absorption properties
are known to within 10%! (My exclamation mark).

2. Contributions
to global warming from the various GHGs since the pre-industrial era are
computed with help from formulae which give answers that are very small
and in some cases are almost indistinguishable from zero. The uncertainties
for each value are given and are in some cases of the order of 100%. The
individual forcings are summed to give a value which must be in great doubt.

3. Climate forcing...by
tropospheric water vapour, the strongest GHG, is not included...because
this water vapour amount is a function of climate and thus represents a
feedback, rather than a forcing.

This is convoluted logic and surely it
would be better to say that water vapour is the strongest GHG and that
its effect depends upon the temperature changes brought about by the other
GHGs. Also, it would be better to admit that the magnitude and even the
sign of the water feedback are not known with any certainty.

4. The effects of aerosols are discussed
quite properly, but the overall forcing of minus 0.4 Watts per square meter
is put into statistical perspective by the error limits of plus or minus
0.3 such units.

5. Clouds are discussed at length. Anthropogenic
cloud changes are a potentially larger climate forcing than direct aerosol
effects, but they are even more uncertain. Aerosol-cloud models give a
cloud forcing of minus 1 Watt per square meter, but this varies by an order
of magnitude as model parameters are varied within their uncertainties.
A second estimate of cloud forcing is based on the damping (I hope no pun
is intended here) of the diurnal cycle of surface temperature that has
occurred. Mechanisms that damp local diurnal cycles include increase of
soil moisture and increase of atmospheric aerosols, but quantitative analysis
shows that these mechanisms are unable to account for the large observed
global-scale damping. Model simulations give rise to the conclusion that
cloud forcing has changed since the pre-industrial era to the extent of
minus 1 Watt per square meter with an uncertainty of a factor of two.

They do not mention that the cloud effect
more-or-less cancels out the positive forcing from the GHGs. In the conclusion
they still maintain that the carbon dioxide doubling sensitivity is 3 degrees
C plus or minus 1.5 degrees.

6. The question is put: why has the carbon
dioxide growth rate flattened despite continued increase of fossil fuel
emissions? Is this a long-term increase in a carbon sink or a temporary
biospheric uptake presaging a later burst of carbon dioxide growth? No
answers are attempted (as seen in some examination answer papers!).

There has been some argument about this
recently and increased transpiration rates have been suggested to offset
any temporary fixing of carbon in the greening of the planet. Of course
transpiration increases with increasing plant growth. The point is that
it all results in more carbon being extracted from the atmosphere. The
Dutch tomato growers know all about this. They increase the carbon dioxide
in their greenhouses by a factor of two by burning kerosene. This results
in four crops of tomatoes instead of three per season. That equates well
with the expected 30% increase in carbon fixation if global carbon dioxide
doubles (which it cannot do).

7. Solar radiance is discussed, but only
direct changes are considered. The Svenmark/Lassen/Friis-Christensen correlations
are ignored, which brings me to the paper in Nature that has caused some
argument.

The Nature paper of 3rd June 1999, page
437 by Lockwood, Stamper and Wild reports that the Sun's coronal magnetic
field has doubled during the last century. They show a graph of the variations
in the total solar magnetic flux emanating through the coronal source sphere
from 1870 to date. This correlates strongly with the Svenmark/Lassen/Friis-Christensen
correlations and with the terrestrial temperature record beloved of the
IPCC and including the Schneider' approaching ice-age of the 1970s. It
deserves to be taken very seriously and casts further doubt upon the current
IPCC methods of forecasting the future climate.

Heinz Hug and I are currently making progress
with our separate studies of the spectroscopy underlying the radiative
transfer merchants. There are grave discrepancies between theory and
experimental measurements of simple spectra which must be explained before
the radiative theorists are to be believed. I have already tried to
explain my objections and will continue to do so even though the Bratermans
of this world insist upon misunderstanding what I write.

The basic theory of radiative transfer
is beyond question except for the spectroscopic discrepancies already referred
to. My main objection is that what holds for a solid angle of pure air
does not apply to a solid angle of real air moving at a very high angular
velocity which causes an ever-changing intensity of in-coming radiation.
The received radiation is emitted by the surface but does not reach space
on average for a good number of days as it goes through the transformations
of the real atmosphere. It is all absorbed by the lowest 100 meters of
the atmosphere and is largely (i.e. more than 99.9%
- I got into trouble with Houghton, Shine and Braterman & Co., for
saying that it was all transformed) transformed into thermal energy
of the lower atmosphere. My other grave sin was to deny that excited molecules
could emit radiation to return to their ground states. In the context of
the paper I should have said that radiative return was highly unlikely
at high gas pressures. I explained this in my reply to the Spectrochimica
Acta journal.

Some people are still writing about these
terrible errors and I which they would spend their energies on more productive
pursuits. The thermal energy of the lower atmosphere reaches the upper
atmosphere by radiative transfer, thermal conduction, convection and by
the release of energy when water vapour condenses. From the higher atmosphere
radiative transfer becomes overwhelmingly predominant as the loss of energy
to space can only take place radiatively. Until these physical processes
are properly incorporated into models I will view such efforts with grave
suspicion.